LB

Helpful, informative, and engaging! I've always been at the top of my classes in English, but this is helping me sharpen my skills even more and apply them to my life.

PB

Apr 01, 2018

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Hard work and worth it! Grateful for the opportunity. Fully recommend it for anyone who is serious about learning to write clearly and improve their prose.

从本节课中

Critical Reading

This week will concentrate on the skill of reading critically. Additionally, we will learn about the conventions of academic writing, including integrating evidence and schools of citation. Finally, you are encouraged to write your own critical review of "The Sweet Spot." This is an optional writing assignment, but it is a requirement to receive a honor's certificate.

教学方

Dr. Denise Comer

Assistant Professor of the Practice; Director of First-Year Writing

脚本

Hello, nice to see you again. Today we're discussing how to integrate evidence into your writing. Evidence takes the form of data, quotes, paraphrase, or summary. It looks very different depending on the context in which you're writing and the disciplinary perspective that you are using to approach your writing. So we're going to try to think about this from a variety of different possible disciplines. Let's first think about why do academic writers use evidence? Just several of the most important reasons are that they use it so that they can do research. Academic writing is about an ongoing conversation, engaging with the work of others and evidence enables you to show that you are actually working really closely with other writers and other ideas. We also, as academic writers want to advance knowledge. So the evidence we use, I think should show that this is what has happened before, this is where we're may be heading, and this is why I think we're heading there, right? So you're using it to advance knowledge. You also use it to make arguments. If you make a claim, often you'll need to show why you're making that claim and how you arrived to that conclusion. So that other people will have more faith in what you have to say. And finally, just from a writerly perspective, it adds variety. You are exciting to read and listen to, but it's always a little more exciting if you can add other voices into your writing too. So for just the logistical reason of adding variety to your writing. It adds variety. Using evidence effectively, this one of two slides that we'll discuss. This is, in general, the reasons why you would use evidence and how to do it most effectively. When you use evidence, you want to try to use it in a way that's honest and generous. And by honest I mean, well, let's think about what's dishonest. What would be kind of dishonest or at least questionably ethical, what we might be familiar with in some political context. Where somebody's words are taken out of context or a little clip from a sentence is taken and then used for kind of an alternative viewpoint, and that's kind of not in a generous, honest spirit. In academic writing you don't want to try to catch people with the three words of one sentence that they said that maybe works against a larger point. So, you want to try to be as honest as possible. And also as generous as possible. So it's quite reasonable for you to take other writers to task for arguments that they make, but you wouldn't want to nitpick about every single sentence or small sentences. I mean sometimes you might, but anyways, you want to try to be as generous as possible. And I've certainly seen arguments though where a writer suggests that a term that someone used was not carefully deployed. And that is perfectly fine, but as long as you are trying to be generous, as you would hopefully want others to be with your ideas too. Using evidence effectively also, it's very important to think about framing evidence. So I like to think about this in terms of a sandwich. So if you think about the middle of the sandwich being whatever, the tuna fish, or roast beef, or eggplant, whatever is in the middle of your sandwich. And then on either side of your sandwich are pieces of bread. And so when you integrate evidence, you're actually framing with pieces of material above and below. And this means that you're sometimes introducing the evidence here at the top, in the top piece of the bread. You're situating the evidence for readers. You're offering contacts. And then in the bottom of the bread, you are explicating why you have included that evidence. Making sure that it's clear to the readers. That you're going to get from that evidence, what you hope. Sometimes you just some of that work up here to. So most evidence, in all kinds of disciplines has some kind of frame to it. Make sure it's connected and useful for your argument. That there's a reason to be using it. And that you've made that reason clear to readers. In addition to thinking about how to use it effectively in terms of why you would you use it, you also want to think about the way that you use it in your writing. And this has to do with deploying it with disciplinary awareness. So, if you're writing in a field that does not use graphics very much. Pie charts, tables, linear representations. You might want to be very careful about whether you are choosing to use that. Sometimes there's a reason to do that, because you need to represent your data in that way. Other times you want to be working more inline with whatever the disciplinary conventions are. And you can know those disciplinary conventions by reading other articles and knowing what kinds of data they use. You want to vary it in terms of length, placement, framing. Sometimes we have a proclivity to put a quote at the end of every paragraph, right? So, if you're noticing that about your writing then that's a great thing, notice it, and then vary it so that you don't always put some in the middle, some at the top. You also want it engineered as appropriate for the purpose that you're using. So try not to include much extraneous data. So you can certainly abridge quotes if you need to. Or include the most relevant information for tables. Now in the sciences, it's important to include lots of data and be transparent and open. So, that's a little bit of a different situation. But, you want to include mostly what you want to engineer your evidence in an honest and generous way so that it fits most effectively within your argument. And then finally, you want to attribute and cite it correctly. So, if you get a quote from somewhere, you want to know who that quote's from so you don't accidentally say it was from Miller when it was really from Comer, right? Or vice versa. And then you want to try as much as possible to attend to citation conventions when you're employing it so that your readers know where and when you got that. Let's first think about data as evidence. And data provides information to readers on an experiment or study. It's very visual often in nature. So here's an example. The writers Comer sampled had the following rates of confidence in writing. And then I have given you an example of framing it below here, right? It's framed below and above with it the evidence sandwich, [LAUGH] I guess. Her findings suggest that most people have strong feelings about their confidence as writers. So, therefore, I'm explicating what in this table you're supposed to notice. Now, your readers might notice other stuff, and that's good because that's what forwarding knowledge is. They'll take your work, and then they'll notice something else. But you want to frame it in this way. Frequently asked questions about data that we get are, why can't the data speak for itself? Why do you need to explicate it? You cannot assume that readers are going to see what you're seeing in your data. So, you're the one who's done that synthesizing kind of work, of thinking about what's important. So, go ahead and share that with your readers. Why do writers need to include all the data? Isn't it too much? Well again, you want to make sure you include as much data as possible within that caveat of it being relevant so that other scholars can take your ideas and move forward. And other questions include, what happens if my data don't support the hypothesis? That one can happen. And, and that's okay, because a hypothesis is a hypothesis. And if it ends up the data don't collaborate that, then you've actually answered the question well, right? No, this is not the way it goes, so let's look elsewhere. So, a lot of important work in scholarship happens as we rule out possibilities and that's important in itself. And this fourth one here, I just added because my child was in a science fair recently and the lead scientist came up to evaluate his poster. And he represented data in a table form, an Excel spreadsheet, and the lead scientist said, well, I think it would have been much better represented if you had used a pie chart. And it just hadn't occurred to me as I was helping him with the science fair exhibit or to him, to think about how best to represent to depict the data. But that is a really important concern. I'm sure everybody out there who does the data already always thinks about that. But since I'm humanities, I don't have to think about that, so I wanted to include it here. Quotes. Quotes are the kind of evidence that are most often used in my discipline of English literature, writing studies and humanities. Quotes take language directly from another text or person. Comer argues, reading and responding to other people's writing makes you a stronger writer. Her argument echos what several others writers have suggested. Atkin, for instance. And here, you can see I'm engineering the quote a little bit. I'm maintaining honesty and generosity. I'm not mincing someone's words, but I've taken out some extraneous words that were quite relevant from my argument. And that ellipses indicates that. And then I've included here the sandwich, right? Comer argues. Here's a second example. Comer hopes that all writers can get valuable and meaningful feedback. And this is an example I've just embedded phrase there. So you can use longer quotes, shorter quotes. There are also even longer quotes that are called block quotes. People often wonder how many quotes you should include. The answer to that is going to be frustrating because it just depends. How many quotes do you need? And is there kind of an appropriate balance between your voice and the quotes that you're including? You don't want it to seem too heavily weighted toward too many quotes, and you also don't want to seem too heavily weighted towards only your voice. So some kind of balance there, and that shifts based on context. People wonder where you should put quotes. My answer to that is in many different places and for many different reasons. You want to think about why you need a quote. What purpose is it serving in your argument, and then that should help you understand where to put it. The difference between quoting and paraphrasing is that quoting is actually taking language directly from another. And paraphrasing is where you taken an idea from someone else and then you change the words. In both cases, you do need to cite those with page numbers and page references or the year and author. But they are different. So quotes, again, are direct language from another person, where you're actually quoting what someone has said. And then paraphrasing, by contrast, is where it's your own words, but you're taking the idea from someone else. How do I cite quotes? We have videos about schools of citation across the disciplines and so we will reserve that for one of those. Paraphrase also as evidence. It enables you to succinctly draw on another's point. If you want to just take the idea and you don't necessarily think that you need to quote it, it's a fine opportunity just to paraphrase it. A paraphrase is a specific moment in a text. Comer suggests that a number of factors shape writing expectations, culture, age, disciplinary lens and environment. One that she neglects to mention is medium. And so in this case, we're pretending that Comer had a book about this. And that on page 38, she discusses culture. On page 142, page 150, disciplinary lens and environment. And on page 180 it was the environment. So again, notice that these are framed appropriately each time. With paraphrasing we already talked about the difference between paraphrasing and quoting. Paraphrasing and summary is a little harder to differentiate sometimes. The best way to think about it is that summary is where you take a large amount of text and condense it and summarize it. And paraphrase is where you take sort of text that's of equal value and convert it into your own words of equal kind of length and value. So, you could take an idea from a sentence, and turn it into your own sentence, and you still said it. Summary would be, if you take an entire book, and condense it into a summary of a paragraph or a sentence. Do you need to cite paraphrases? Yes, a lot of students are confused about this. I wanted to emphasize that. Summary as evidence, again, it condenses large amounts of material and enables you to draw really briefly on other's work and allows you to move forward. So here's an example. Many scholars of writing studies have argued for the importance of self-reflection. And this would be kind of a list of all of these scholars who have done this work. And so your readers could then very quickly go to your work cited or your references, bibliography and look up all of this scholarship. In his article, Self-Reflection is important, Miller points out the negative impact of a lack of self-reflection. My project builds on this work bringing format into consideration: What are the best formats for writerly self-reflection? So the summary enables you to draw, in this example, on prior scholarship. A map of the field so that you can situate your own argument within this larger trajectory. Frequently asked questions about summary. Do you need to cite summaries? You need to attribute where they came from by text and author, but you don't cite particular page numbers if you're using that school of citation, unless you're referring to a specific moment in a text. How long should your summaries be? I'll give one of those answers again. It depends. Again, you want to take into consideration what you need from the summary. What purpose the summary is serving for your argument. And how much room and time the summary is taking as opposed to your own ideas. Can summary include data, quotes and paraphrase? Yes, these kinds of summary overlap. And again, even within particular disciplines there's lots of overlap, so overlap and variety is a good thing. Go ahead and make your own new kinds of ways of framing evidence. And that's part of what we do as writers. So, hopefully this helps explain how to integrate evidence into your writing. And I am looking forward to reading the strategies you use as you integrate evidence into your arguments.